Social Media ROI: Three Ways Digital Marketers Can Show its Worth

If you’re not showing C-suite executives exactly what you make off your social media marketing program, show them how much money they’re saving.

ROI: Beyond the Dollar Bills

That’s one of the messages from social media metrics analyst Cappy Popp of Thought Labs. To make the most of social media marketing, digital marketers, Popp said, can define social media metrics in three ways: activity, engagement and acquisition — and do a lot of it with free tools.

“ROI no longer just means money to a lot of C-Suite executives,” said Popp, who caught up with his us after his presentation last month at the Kentico Connection conference in Burlington, MA. “They also see it as a cost-savings measure and also see it as a brand-mention or personality play. It can also be for crisis management and crisis aversion.”

Digital marketers should be tracking the type of content they post, and the frequency it’s posted.

Activity: Tracking Content

“It will allow you to easily determine what content actually resonates with your community,” Popp said. “And therefore, you can also optimize when you post your content to save money. Basically, you’re saving dollars for doing less work, which affects your bottom line.”

Free tools also affect bottom lines.

Facebook, Popp said, provides new tools in its free Page Insights app that shows when a page's fans are online and most likely to engage with its content. Free tools like Buffer make it incredibly easy to optimally publish posts on all major networks based on algorithms that determine when your posts get the most engagement on a specific network, Popp added.

“It makes the most sense to do some manual work up front to determine — through experimentation using the data each platform provides — when your posts get the highest engagement and then test posting at different times to validate this,” Popp said. “Automated tools like Buffer analyze a discrete time period so it's important that they get the most accurate data possible before you depend upon them too heavily.”

Image courtesy of nopporn (Shutterstock)

Engagement: How Does Your Audience Evolve?

You’ve grown your fan base. That’s all good. But what is the value of those fans? What kind of engagement do you have?

“We hear a lot of people talking about the number of fans they have,” Popp said, “and these tend to be value metrics that don’t work as well anymore because they don’t really mean that much by themselves.”

However, see how your audience has changed over time and compare that to historical data and your competition. Are you behind? In which areas has your audience grown on a demographic scale?

Traditionally, organizations have been taking their total number of fans on their social media sites and dividing that by the total number of likes, shares, comments and all types of interaction.

But for better engagement measures, organizations can use total engagement as it relates to total reach. How? For Facebook, add the likes, comments and shares and divide that by the total number of fans to get an engagement rate.

Question the Data

Take this data, however, for what it’s worth. It includes data from non-fans and relates them to fans. Users don't have to be fans to like, comment or share a page's content.

“If you divide all engagement by total fans you are inflating the engagement rate because non-fan interactions are included,” Popp said.

And remember — traditional calculations don't necessarily include other important activities such as clicks on a post, views of a video or views past a call to action within a video.

Further, this approach can interpret one person’s likes as dozens of unique users, not a single one.

“Most importantly, traditional approaches don't take reach into account,” Popp said. “Facebook severely limits the number of people that see a page's content organically. Traditional methods relate engagement to total fans; however, a vanishingly small percentage of these fans may have ever had the opportunity to interact with the content in the first place because they never saw it.”

Better Method: Engagement Divided by Reach

Using total engagement divided by total reach is much more accurate: 

• Total engagement: includes all activity taken on a piece of content, not just likes, comments and shares.
• Total reach: includes fans and non-fans and also takes into account the number of user that actually saw the content.

Further, target your campaign messages specifically with demographic data.

“You can see where your data is being used and seen,” Popp said. “If you’re targeting the wrong people, and your messaging doesn’t reach the people you’re targeting, you’re wasting your money. We see a lot of that being a problem.”

Acquisition Metrics: Finding Your Top Fans

Acquiring your top fans can be done via a number of different platforms, whether it’s manually or with social analytics tools.

Ultimately you’re looking to see if your social media presence has an impact on your web traffic. Tools like Google Analytics' free social acquisition reports make it “easier than ever to track conversions through social media channels online,” Popp said.

You can track which social networks sent you the most traffic, which users saved your social content, which landing pages users hit on your site when coming from social networks, activity from social plugins like the Google+ +1 button or the Facebook social plugins.

“Tools like these were very expensive and difficult to use until recently and now Google is giving them away free of charge,” Popp said. “There's no reason not to use them.”

Remember Organization Vision

Definitely not. However, be sure when trying to “sell” your social media marketing program that while these formulas and tools may produce sharp charts and bar graphs for the execs, you must reflect on your organization’s mission through its social media platform.

What were the original goals? And does your program produce tangible results that adhere to those goals?

We’re thinking the answers to these questions on a couple of slides for the executives meeting will be even more impressive.

Image in opening paragraph courtesy of Sarawut Aiemsinsuk (Shutterstock).

By Dom Nicastro.  Article Source: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/social-media-roi-three-ways-digital-marketers-can-show-its-worth-022772.php

7 ways Twitter could make money (beyond cozying up to TV networks)

Twitter’s IPO filing reveals that despite its glossy brand, it is a money-losing machine. Despite revenues tripling last year to $317 million, it lost $79 million, and the bleeding is only getting worse, as ad rates fell 46 percent last quarter. It’s likely to lose even more money this year. In the first six months alone it racked up $69 million in losses. Meanwhile, its user base has been growing more slowly. In the US last quarter, Twitter registered a scant 2 percent growth in Twitterati.

The micro-blogging-conversation platform-social network-short-form messaging service-personalized news wire-mental masturbation machine (or insert your favorite description here) needs to make money if it’s to succeed long term. As with cable TV, where you can have thousands of channels but can’t find anything worth watching, Twitter has amassed hundreds of millions of users and still not be able to wring a dime in profit.

What can it do?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told Jeff Bercovici in a revealing hot-off-the-presses Forbes magazine cover story that “the characteristics that make up Twitter — public, real-time and conversational — make it a perfect complement to television.” What’s more, ”TV has always been social and conversation-driven. It’s just that in the past, the reach of that conversation was limited by the number of people in a room or who you could talk to on the phone or the next day at the water cooler. Broadcasters have come to understand that Twitter is a force multiplier for the media they’ve created.”

If you doubt Costolo’s interest in TV, he even retweeted an AllThingsD story by Peter Kafka, reporting that “Twitter Gets Its Strongest TV Tie-Up So Far, With an Ambitious Comcast Deal.”

With its eye on television, Twitter wants to build on its role as TV companion, to be, as Bercovici put it, the “second screen experience that transforms TV into a participatory activity, allowing Twitter users to broadcast wisecracks, critiques and theories in real time.” In a nut shell, tweets of shows become marketing and, the theory goes, induce more people who see these tweets to tune in, boosting ratings, pushing up ad rates, and achieving singularity in the universe.

There are, I think, other ways Twitter could generate revenue, and without messing up the user experience. The search of a new ad unit beyond the oft-ridiculed banner and keyword advertisement — one that Facebook and others also seek — remains elusive.

So here are seven other revenue-generating possibilities that wouldn’t muck with the user experience.

1. Charge companies to use Twitter.

Advertisers, brands, and corporations, the ABC of American capitalism, are on Twitter, because they can market themselves to us. For this privilege, why shouldn’t they pay Twitter? Charge subscriptions of $10,000 a year to JetBlue, McDonalds, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, and all of these other corporations (Small- to mid-sized businesses could pay far less.) Either they pay up or vacate the premises. Would any of us miss these businesses if they were blocked from promoting low air fares, Big Macs, and lingerie on Twitter?

2. Make users with more than, say, 500,000 followers pay.

It doesn’t have to be 500,000 users. It could be 1 million or 100,000. But once you get beyond a certain threshold of users, you become a brand, and, as I said above, brands should pay. So Ashton Kutcher (15 million followers), Miley Cyrus (14.6 million), and President Barack Obama (almost 38 million) get out your checkbooks, whip out your credit cards or ready your bitcoins, because you should pony up if you want to communicate over Twitter with your legions of admirers. In essence, Twitter would be adopting a freemium model, and premium users should pay premium prices.

3. Create a premium app.

I don’t know about you, but I find Twitter a hot mess to navigate and would pay for an app that would combine advanced metrics with artificial intelligence engines to curate tweets and content based on my interests. The longer I’m on Twitter, the more people I follow, the more I miss. Subscribing to the 80-20 rule (thank you Pareto Principle) even if two out of 10 tweets is actually useful, a lot of juicy stuff speeds through my tweetstream unread. I’d like an app to pick out the relevant bits and line up all those good links to content I might like in a tasty interface. While Twitter is at it, it could allow me entree to some useful metrics. Help me tailor my tweets to generate more impact and point me to other conversation threads I might enjoy.

That’s something for which I’d pay a monthly subscription. I dole out about $10 a month to music streaming companies like MOG. I’d do the same for an app that opened up a whole new world of Twitter absorption. If 1 million people joined me, that’d be $120 per user x a million, or $120 million a year in revenue. That alone would more than offset the company’s losses.

4. Sell premium tweets longer than 140 characters.

Have you ever gotten into a Twitter hullabaloo with someone or someone and found that 140 characters wasn’t sufficient for expressing yourself? Of course you have. So maybe Twitter could let you pay extra for tweets fatter than 140 characters. Say, charge $5 for them so they’re expensive enough that users would only pay up if they really needed to. With 200 million plus users, $5 a pop could really add up.

5. Charge third party app developers.

Twitter hasn’t exactly been friendly to third party developers over the years. It’s also not been very interested in unifying the user experience. I use YoruFukurou on my laptop to access Twitter and Twitter’s own mobile app on my iPhone. Sometimes, if I want to check out someone else’s stream, I find it easier to go to Twitter.com. Not a seamless experience.

Third party developers worry that they could create something, only to have Twitter create the same product and drive them off the platform. So why not make third party apps pay, which would give them peace of mind while also bringing in some cold cash to the company?

6. Sell personalized Twitter portals modeled roughly on Flipboard.

You tweet and months later it’s gone or unfindable. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a place that collected all your tweets a la RebelMouse, curated and categorized them based on their content, glitzed them up with Pinterest-y photos and made your entire Twitter history searchable? I’d pay, say, $25 a year for this like I do with Apple’s iCloud. If 1 million users joined me that would be another $25 million in annual revenue for Twitter.

7. Allow high voltage users to create premium communities.

Let’s face it. Some Twitter-ers have more influence than you or I do. Every word they utter is an intellectual elixir that can fix everything that ails you. So why not let them charge followers for these nuggets of wisdom? Twitter could take a cut of these transactions and make enough money to cover snacks and soft drinks at corporate HQ.

Done right, these seven strategies could turn Twitter’s balance sheet from red to black, and ensure repeatable revenue for years to come. Not sexy as with Hollywood and TV, but, I think, definitely hashtag worthwhile.

BY ADAM L. PENENBERG.  Article source: http://pandodaily.com/2013/10/09/7-ways-twitter-could-make-money-beyond-cozying-up-to-tv-networks/

7 Social Media Tips You Can Learn From Richard Branson

Blog Post By Carmine Gallo.

In a recent blog post Richard Branson offered six tips on using social media. Specifically, he revealed how Virgin Unite and other non-profits are leveraging social media to get their message across. I believe these six tips apply to any social media campaign for any business, not just non-profits. Here are the six tips along with one bonus tip based on my personal observation of Richard Branson.

1. Tell stories. “People respond to stories, not data.”
2. Be creative. “Experiment with new ways of telling stories and make the most of all the new tools out there like Tumblr and Storify.”
3. Choose the right channel. “Match your content to different platforms and audiences.”
4. Be truthful. “Don’t pretend you’re something you’re not.”
5. Work together. “Collaborate with people and organizations who are fighting for the same cause.”
6. Have fun. “Work should be fun and making work fun brings success.”

Bonus tip #7. Do it yourself. The most successful leaders on social media are actively engaged themselves on social platforms; they don’t delegate social media. I spent a day with Branson, which I wrote about in this Forbes.com article. In between our conversations, I had the opportunity to see how Branson interacts with his team, employees, and customers. I was surprised to see him carrying a smartphone and sending out his own tweets. For example, when his marketing manager showed him a photograph of a Virgin employee, he said, “Send me the picture. I’ll think of a funny caption and I’ll post it.” The Twitter posts from the handle @richardbranson go out to 3.5 million followers and most are from Branson himself. Branson also writes his own blog posts.

As his tips suggest, Branson has fun with his Tweets. It’s not uncommon to for him to post photos of himself at a party or simply having a good time.

This week he posted this tweet about the new Virgin Active health clubs in South Africa: “When Nelson Mandela phoned yours truly in the bath, who knew by 2012 we would open this: ‪http://virg.in/yowyVHe once posted, “There are no baby planes because @virgin always pulls out on time. Ask your mother to explain…” I understand that not every exec can be as irreverent, cheeky, and outspoken as Branson, but his approach is unique and engaging precisely because it’s authentic.

Many of the leaders who I meet or interview are completely disengaged from their company’s social media. They delegate Twitter and Facebook to their Public Relations manager or outside PR agency to use as a broadcast tool instead of a platform to facilitate conversations. I’ve lost count at how many Tweets I’ve sent to executives, leaders, experts, and brands that go unanswered. It’s rare to get a response and I’m giving them an opportunity to be featured in this column. It tells me there’s no authentic voice behind the account. I can hear some of you say, “Carmine, you can’t expect a leader to respond to all three million followers.” True. But most people don’t have anywhere near three million Twitter followers. They’re simply disengaged.

Branson’s six tips are excellent and will work for any leader or brand on social media. The seventh tip, however, makes the first six more effective. Don’t be on social media just to say you’re on it. By definition, “social” is the opposite of isolation. If you’re going to join a community, go all in.

By Carmine Gallo.  Article Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2013/10/04/7-social-media-tips-you-can-learn-from-richard-branson/

5 Online Marketing Trends Affecting Small Businesses Beyond 2013

A frequently asked questions video series is a great online marketing strategy. Image: Flickr

The last few years have been crazy for small businesses. Five to ten years ago the approach to online marketing was pretty straightforward. Companies would invest a certain amount of the marketing budget in paid search ads and perhaps try a little bit of search engine optimization. Cost per click on paid ads was relatively low and it only took a few links to rank for important keywords. Website traffic would roll in and the business would earn new customers.

But things have changed and small businesses now face different challenges.

Today, there are so many different aspects of online marketing. Search has changed. SEO has changed. There are a million different social media networks. It’s hard to know what is important and what is best left alone. However, there are a few key areas where you can feel safe investing your time and money.

1. Content-Driven SEO

Many small businesses have noticed a change in SEO during the last two years. For some, the change has been a drop in organic search website traffic. Google has pushed out two major updates – Panda and Penguin – that changed the emphasis for high rankings.

Google and other search engines continue to repeat the importance of producing content that people find interesting. This means blog posts, videos (more on that later), slideshows, and all kinds of content that will entertain, educate, and enlighten.

Search engines are getting better at determining the most relevant results for keywords. For small businesses, this means starting an ongoing content strategy in order to continue getting organic search traffic.

2. Mobile Devices

By 2017, an estimated 68% of the US population will be using a smartphone.

Smartphones are changing the way people access information. There is a higher demand for information and any company focused on providing that information has the opportunity to grow.

Small businesses have the opportunity to access target customers throughout the sales process. When your customer has a question on their morning train ride to work, your blog post could be the first answer they find when in Google. That’s content marketing.

When your customer is checking their email before bed,  your email newsletter can give them something interesting to read and an offer for your newest service. When your customer is near your location, a text message can alert them to your daily deal.

In the coming years, people will access the Internet primarily from their phones. Optimizing your marketing strategy for that new reality positions you for marketing success.

3. Higher Design and Usability Standards

Simply having a business website is still good enough for some companies, but there is a higher importance placed on design and usability. And in the coming years, websites optimized for the mobile experience will find a growing audience.

Consumers want fast experiences. Networks are improving, but websites and apps need to keep pace. Consumers won’t wait for a website to load. If it takes too long, there are plenty of other places they can find the same information and service.

Design and usability are no longer a complement to your marketing strategy. Design and usability are quickly becoming an  essential part of marketing efforts because if users don’t like what they see they’ll leave. Make it easy for them to find what they are looking for with a fast loading site that is easy to navigate.

4. Video Production

More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month. Internet users are watching more video than ever and they’re demanding more. Search engines like Google are also giving more real estate to videos in the search results. If you want access to your target market in the coming years you’ll need to build a video strategy.

Product videos, demonstrations, testimonials and more can all be part of your online marketing strategy. As others struggle to figure out video you can take advantage now and start earning new customers before everyone realizes the importance of video in online marketing.

5. Social Media Audiences

Every business relies on an audience. A small, local business depends on their local market for new customers. They build up a customer base and those customers tell their extended network by word of mouth.

Today, social media presents a huge opportunity for small businesses to grow an audience with no location barriers. Building an audience of followers on Twitter, connections on LinkedIn, and subscribers on YouTube gives you access to an nearly unlimited amount of potential customers. It’s is quickly becoming an essential way to grow your business.

Conclusion

If you’ve noticed a change in the way your small business has acquired customers in the last couple years, you’re not alone.

Many businesses have been caught off guard by the change in online marketing. But strategies like better content, greater social media engagement, and video production will be the big items to focus on going forward. By putting a strategy in place today, you can start getting ahead of your competition.

By Andrew Pincock.  Article Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-online-marketing-trends-affecting-small-businesses-beyond-2013/70941/